On Mon, May 18, 2026, at 06:28, Ethan Nelson-Moore wrote:
> The Nios II architecture is a soft-core architecture developed by
> Altera (since acquired by Intel) and intended to run on their FPGAs.
>
> Licenses for the architecture have not been available for purchase
> since 2024 [1], and support for it has been removed from GCC 15 [2],
> Buildroot [3], and QEMU [4].
>
> Given all of these factors, it is time to remove Nios II support from
> the kernel. The maintainer stated in 2024 that they were planning to do
> so soon [5], but this did not come to pass.
>
> Remove Nios II support from the kernel and move the former maintainer
> to CREDITS. Thank you, Dinh Nguyen, for maintaining Nios II support!
Hi Ethan,
We last discussed this a year ago when Simon Schuster mentioned[1]
that Siemens Energy is still using NIOS-2 in production and would
prefer to have this still included in Linux for at least another
few years until the obligation for kernel updates ends.
My feeling is that the maintenance burden of keeping nios2 is
relatively low. On the other hand, maintaining it out of tree
as a patch set is also something that should not be all that
hard if it does get removed.
Simon mentioned that he expected others to also use nios2 with
new kernels, but I have not heard from anyone else actually
doing it.
I've added Simon and Andreas to Cc here to let them comment
more here.
Arnd
[1] https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/2025-March/140140.html
